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Future German government under Merkel no laughing matter on political roast day

Rather than abstaining from alcohol, Germany's politicians took swigs of beer and rhetorical swipes at one another during traditional party gatherings on Ash Wednesday. But the humor also veered into more serious ground.

The get-togethers held annually by each of Germany's political parties on the first day of the Christian fasting season of Lent historically trend towards informal, beer-drinking affairs filled with light-hearted political digs at one another.

In response to many younger members of the party who held aloft "NoGROKO" placards at the event, Scholz said the electorate would not forgive the SPD if it did not behave responsibly. Some 460,000 Party members will vote via mail on whether or not to approve the coalition deal.

Scholz has been tapped to take over as finance minister should SPD members give the GroKo government the go-ahead.

These pleas, however, did not stop Scholz from taking a dig at the chancellor, likening her political fortunes to those of Horst Seehofer, the chief of the Christian Social Union (CSU), the CDU's Bavarian sister party, whose political star appears to be on the wane.

"Not only has a Bavarian politician very likely passed the zenith of his political career but also possibly a woman from the north,” said Scholz, referring to Merkel's birthplace in Hamburg, the city where he currently serves as mayor.

Although Seehofer looks set to become Germany's next interior minister, his political capital in Bavaria was damaged by the party's poor showing in the September 2017 general election.

The vote saw the CSU fall to its record-low result of 38.8 percent, down 10.5 percentage points from 2013, as it hemorrhaged support to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which gained 19.7 percent in the southern state. Merkel's own CDU also suffered losses, while the SPD earned its worst election result in party history.

Meanwhile, Merkel's Union partner, the CSU, used its Ash Wednesday roast instead as a sober reminder to its members to be wary of the AfD. In the city of Passau, state premier-elect of Bavaria Markus Söder — who is taking over from Seehofer at the helm of the Bavarian government — made a rousing appeal to his followers, calling on them to recapture the political ground that the party had lost in the 2017 election.

Söder (left) also raised a beer along with fellow CSU politicians to future of the Bavarian party

Söder stressed that the CSU, and the CDU-CSU Union as a whole, should not only hold the center ground of German politics but should seek to once again dominate the narrative on the right.

"The Union shouldn't just jostle for the middle ground and look over to the left," he said. Many in the CSU have expressed dissatisfaction at the potential government partnership with the SPD, as well as with the slow but steady shift leftward by Merkel's CDU in the previous government.

"We are there for the people in the middle, but we also want to reunite the democratic right," Söder said. "That doesn't mean a move to the right, but rather a return to old-fashioned credibility."

"It was a mistake to surrender to others those voters who are to the right of the center," he added, referring to the AfD's capture of 12.6 percent of the national vote. "The Union must make clear to voters that the AFD is no 'substitute union.'"